Compositional structure of a speech genre “business letter”.

A. L. Kotkovets

Abstract

The article investigates the structural and compositional organization of a business letter text as a speech genre. Functional and thematic classifications of official letters are provided. Terms “business letter”, “functional style”, “speech genre”, and “composition” are defined. Main features of the style of official documents are studied. Lexical, grammatical and syntactical means used in business correspondence, having a stylistic function are considered in the article. A speech genre is described as a relatively stable type of utterance in any of the spheres of a human activity, that reflects specific conditions and goals of this area not only in their content (thematic) and linguistic style, that is the selection of vocabulary, phraseology and grammar of the language, but above all in their compositional structure. Composition is characterized as a result of the interaction between content, formal aspect and pragmatic aim. The peculiarities of the studied speech genre text composition are investigated, standardization, informativity, modality, dialogueness, text division, cohesion, and integration being among them. The interrelation between information presented in the letter and its architectonics is discussed. The division of the text into paragraphs with help of indentation is considered to play a vital role in highlighting the important information. Main communicative blocks of a business letter text and its main structural elements are mentioned.